Using Steady-State Suppression to Improve Speech Intelligibility in Reverberant Environments for Elderly Listeners

Abstract

Reverberation is a large problem for speech communication and it is known that strong reverberation affects speech intelligibility. This is especially true for people with hearing impairments and/or elderly people. Several approaches have been proposed and discussed to improve speech intelligibility degraded by reverberation. Steady-state suppression is one such approach, in which speech signals are processed before being radiated through the loudspeakers of a public address system to reduce overlap masking, which is one of the major causes of degradation in speech intelligibility. We investigated whether the steady-state suppression technique improves the intelligibility of speech in reverberant environments for elderly listeners. In both simulated and actual reverberant environments, elderly listeners performed worse than younger listeners. The performance in an actual hall was better than with simulated reverberation, and this was consistent with the results for younger listeners. Although the normal hearing group performed better than the presbycusis group, the steady-state suppression technique improved the intelligibility of speech for elderly listeners as was observed for younger listeners in both simulated and actual reverberant environments.